Original link: https://topbook.cc/overview?selectedArticle=1977
AI is currently appearing frequently in my life, and it is overwhelming when I open my eyes. For a while, who updated the AI system, and for a while, which big company launched a new language model, so lively.
So in order to find out which industries and professions AI is affecting recently, I spent three days finding eight representative companies, and found that the impact of AI on them is: layoffs.
Then proceed directly to the incomplete enumeration below.
Companies cutting jobs: Insider.
Layoff rate: 10%
Target audience for layoffs: News editors
Insider laid off 10% of its staff, so over 100 news editors lost their jobs. This is a global news publishing house, and the news of layoffs was announced on April 20th. Coincidentally, a week earlier, they had talked about trying to bring AI into the newsroom workflow. It is not difficult to understand why AI will impact the journalism industry. After all, let it make up a story, check whether there are any mistakes in the news content written, or find a topic for me, and set a title for the news report. It’s a small thing… These points are also the original intention of Insider to try to use it to improve efficiency, and then it announced layoffs. Isn’t it very similar to “the cunning rabbit dies, and the good bow hides”, but unfortunately this time the good bow is us beating the workers themselves.
Companies cutting jobs: CNET.
Layoff ratio: 50%
Layoff targets: News and video employees I haven’t been able to find out how many people are involved in CNET’s layoffs, but the percentage is 50%. Half of the news and video employees will lose their jobs.
Layoffs are nothing new, but they are well timed. Before January, the company had secretly published 73 articles using AI. This is like an experiment to test AI writing, try its efficiency in news work, and try its accuracy rate. By the way, 50% of the employees have been streamlined. So it seems that the experiment to test the AI was done well? No, it was discovered that it was AI who wrote the article because of frequent mistakes. For example, the following is the content of one of the articles: Loan calculation problem, you owe 25,000 for buying a car, and the interest rate is 2.5%, so you have to pay 1,000 more interest every year?
Wrong is wrong, don’t delay its decision to lay off 50% of its employees now. I have two news companies in a row. I am a news major, and now I am editing code words, and the bugs are full.
Downsizing company: blue cursor.
Layoff ratio: Unknown
Layoff target groups: Designers, writers, advertising people BlueFocus, a super factory in the advertising industry. “Comprehensively embrace AIGC (AI-generated content)” is a very loud slogan, and BlueFocus has done it decisively: it has decided to completely stop four types of outsourcing expenditures indefinitely: creative design, program writing, copywriting, and short-term employees. I don’t know exactly how many people will be affected, but there is another account that can be calculated: in 2021, he has 5,400 employees, now?
There are only 3000 left. Then it also announced the cessation of outsourcing. Does the advertising industry really need so many workers? Moreover, its cessation of outsourcing is actually not much different from layoffs. In essence, it reduces the number of positions needed by people. Also, the words “total stop indefinitely” are also quite scary. In the advertising industry, AI can automatically generate various types of advertising materials, write ad words, make a product picture, etc., and the output content is very fast.
Layoff company: IBM Corporation.
Layoff ratio: 30% (the next five years)
Target groups for layoffs: human resources, etc.
This ratio affects a lot of people, 7800 people. The figures were released by the CEO of the company, and the number is not complete. This is an International Business Machines Corporation, and the characteristics of the positions it involves are also obvious: none of them are directly facing customers, such as human resources and other positions. But give a stabilizer first, this number is just a forecast, it is expected that in the next five years, 7,800 jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence. According to this forecasted population, the risk of those positions that are not directly facing customers will directly soar.
Layoff company: Zhili Culture.
Layoff ratio: 50%
Target audience for layoffs: Designers This is a designer team of about 50 people. After the introduction of AI painting, the number of people in the company has been reduced by 20%. With the subsequent in-depth use of AI painting software, I am afraid that more than 50% of employees will continue to be reduced this year, that is, more than 20 people will lose their jobs. The company is not big and there are not many people, but the proportion affected by AI is too large. Why is it streamlined? It’s still about efficiency. For example, if they want to create a character image of a certain IP, they first need to draw a prototype, which can be done with AI painting, and the speed is very fast, and several can be prepared at the same time for Party A to choose. “The efficiency has increased by 50% -60%, one person can replace three or four people.” Okay, here I am going to move out the AI painting system Midjourney again, so that everyone can experience its character construction ability at close range:
Layoff company: Meta.
Layoff ratio: Unknown
Layoff target population: specific unknown
Let’s make a comparison first. This time it laid off 10,000 employees, which is equivalent to: the entire CCTV Meta may sound unfamiliar to everyone, but it owns social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Such a large global company plans to lay off 10,000 employees, which is a big deal no matter how you look at it. So blindly blaming AI is kind of bullshit. I believe their rhetoric: “The general economic situation” is one of the key drivers behind the mass layoffs. But AI also plays a role in it. After all, the reason for layoffs also includes “improving efficiency”.
Layoff company: Microsoft.
Layoff rate: 9%
Target population for layoffs: sales and marketing positions
15,000 people, which is the number of layoffs corresponding to 9%. In order to improve efficiency, Microsoft needs to make more use of AI tools, such as using it to analyze what customers need, and can also provide personalized solutions. If the AI speed is fast enough, the conversion rate will be high enough. And these employees who originally needed sales and marketing positions are not needed now. To verify, let AI help me ask who is the audience of Topbook?
Layoff company: Amazon.
Layoff ratio: Unknown
Target groups for layoffs: operation posts, service posts
Amazon, in order to use AI to improve the level of automated services, announced layoffs in January 2023, so about 13,000 global operations and customer service jobs are gone. Customer service, the mass layoffs of this position are seriously impacted by AI. There are ready-made examples in China, such as:
JD.com announced in January that it would cut about 5,000 customer service positions, accounting for 4%. Didi Chuxing, 3,000 people, about 6% of the total. Ctrip, about 2,000, about 5%.
The reasons are similar: in order to improve the efficiency and quality of customer service, choose to use AI and robots to handle common inquiries and complaints. I once had a one-day customer service experience. It was very boring but I had to answer the phone with a smile on my face. After a day, my mouth was dry and my face was stiff, so I can’t say whether it is a good thing or a bad thing for AI to replace this position.
Layoff companies: It’s not all about AI.
Needless to say, artificial intelligence is really an excellent reason for the boss to lay off employees! Be it true or not. But in order not to deliberately create anxiety, it must be stated that AI is not the only reason for the layoffs of the above companies. Take Insider and CNET as an example. These two are like brothers. No matter how coincident the timing of their layoffs, the killing is only because of economic headwinds, and has nothing to do with AI wool. But the introduction of AI on the front foot and the layoffs on the back foot, do you think it is a coincidence? I do not believe. In another paragraph, the boss of Insider admitted that ChatGPT’s output has many errors and plagiarized content, but at the same time announced that it will be used anyway. Strong enough, so are you ready for the next layoff (this sentence is addressed to myself)?
The data suggest this is a start.
The examples are always general, but a research report by Open AI can put the data in concrete terms: 80% of the US workforce will have at least 10% of the tasks affected by the GPT-4 language model, and 19% of the US employees The possibility of being replaced by AI is high, which means that at least 50% of daily work tasks can be better completed by large language models. Some high-income jobs are at greater risk of being replaced by AI. But almost all industries cannot escape the wave of artificial intelligence. The highest displaced occupations included mathematician, tax preparer, author, web designer, accountant, journalist and legal secretary. The conclusion is that it is likely that the higher the income, the greater the impact. However, for a small editor like me, the income is not high, and the impact is not small, so I can find someone to justify.
Finally, there are occupations less likely to be affected by AI’s large language models, including graphic designers, search marketing strategists, and financial managers. The research method adopted in the paper is to find 1016 occupations with standardized descriptions from the American occupational database, and then determine what daily tasks each occupation contains, and use these things for measurement. And how to judge whether it can be replaced? If the efficiency of AI to complete tasks is more than 50% higher than that of humans, it can replace humans. Knock on the blackboard, the comparison is efficiency.
And NBER also released a report a few days ago, about the customer service industry: AI can increase the productivity of customer service by 14%, and shorten the training time to 1/3 of the original. The Century Technology Forum also wanted to join in the fun. It said that because of new technologies, the world will lose 14 million jobs within five years. And what is the attitude of the workers like us to this? According to PwC’s annual Global Workforce Survey, one-third of respondents fear that their role will be replaced by technology within three years. When the mood is up, let’s take a questionnaire:
After all, progress must be made, both AI and me.
Under the impact of technology, whether we choose to embrace new technologies or sign a “joint letter to stop updating research” to stop them, the general trend is unstoppable, but there will be a long period of competition in the process: humans and AI competition. In a struggle, both sides make progress because in order to win, they must get better. Just like when I was fighting with my brother, seeing him getting taller and taller, I guess I would soon be unable to beat him. then what should we do? Let’s change the path to improve myself, try to strengthen my physique to handle him.
Competition produces progress, even if that’s not why it started. Right now it’s an AI versus human race and we feel it’s powerful and career threatening, so it seems like I need to change a bit to keep my job.
An example is that since I haven’t been laid off, while I use AI to improve work efficiency, AI also reversely puts forward higher requirements for my work. This requirement is currently more based on the unique nature of people. I am a journalism major, and now I am editing code words, and I am simply compiling bugs. In the past two months, I have watched artificial intelligence Wen Shengwen, Wen Shengtu, and Tu Shengtu. After taking a look at the ancient poems it imitated, it is a lie that I am not anxious. It is no exaggeration to say that the article written by it now can beat me in some logic and content without waiting for the future. If you don’t believe me, just read this article published by Topbook:
This article is written by AI. It sets up a dialogue between Kobayashi and Copilot, and then uses this scenario to introduce various functions of Copilot. What a setup. I have to write this article for a day, and New Bing only took ten minutes, which is incomparable. And my advantage now is that I am a human being, so I want to stand on the shore and wave to everyone: “See, I am a human being, this article is written by me (a human being)”. Whether it’s gags or pretending to be funny, I’m trying to make a gesture of communication with everyone. This kind of emotional value and sense of companionship is something that AI doesn’t have. (The above unemployment prevention guide is provided by my boss).
So with AI, I found that there are two paths for me to choose: get killed by it OR become more unique. More unique means stronger, because uniqueness comes from creativity. In the short term, AI is not yet capable of creativity. This may be the first progress I have made in this professional competition with AI.
Look, with AI, there is more efficiency, but also has to be forced to be more creative. After all, I need to be “more unique” in order to survive in this competition. At least for now it’s the way to go. So looking at it this way, it is a pity that the eight companies that laid off employees listed above are just here to take the lead. Under the impact of AI, this number will increase. But there are also consoling things: for example, we still have time to think about what to do!
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